Russ Wallace

Check Out This Job at My Company

Tue, 23 Apr 2013 19:37:00 -0700

Songs that most influenced my 2012. No lie: there’s some...

Mon, 31 Dec 2012 12:26:33 -0800

Songs that most influenced my 2012. No lie: there’s some Ke$ha on it. #YOLO.

2013 Goals

Fri, 28 Dec 2012 15:07:00 -0800

Part of me is a little fed up with the personal goal world; does it help? Or is it distracting? Should I make big goals or little ones? Is discipline even real or is it just a myth?

I have no idea what the latest thinking would conclude, but in my experience, it’s helpful to have a sense for what I wanted at the end of the prior year and to compare that to where I am in the current year. So I have several written goals, not all of which I’ll share here, but there are a couple that I’ve been thinking about all year and that I’m excited about:

-Get out of the country at least twice. This is something I miss so much, I can hardly stand it. And damnit, I’m tired of coming up with excuses not to leave. My excuses have typically been “I can’t afford it right now” and “I need to wait a little longer to see what happens with this startup I’m working on.” Both are still applicable, but looking back, I easily could have made it work this year. So I’ll make it work next year for sure. Twice. Some place new. Some place foreign.

-Re-focus on honesty. I don’t know what it is, but lately I’ve been catching myself in little white lies. I’ll tell a story that’s a bit exaggerated, because I’ll think to myself, “it really didn’t go down this way, but it’s not that great of a story otherwise, and I’ve already started telling it.” Which is really an admission that I want my story to succeed, that I want to be liked. That’s fine, everyone does, but I’d rather value honesty over being liked this year.

-Wear a tuxedo at least 12 times. I bought a new tuxedo from Indochino today, and I’m fired up about it. I want to find an excuse to wear it at least 12 times next year: charity events, weddings, holiday parties, even some dinner parties. I really wished I had had one for weddings and holiday parties this year, so now that problem is solved. And it’ll be fun to class things up a bit next year; I wouldn’t mind more tuxedos, less dive bars in my life. I never was a hipster anyway.

Those are the basic goals, and while they’re not that hard, they’re things I might not otherwise achieve unless I set out to do it ahead of time. So that’s my reason for setting goals, and that’s where I’m taking it. Would love to hear some other goals in comments.

ajit verghese: Future of Media: Are paywalls at newspapers inevitable?

Fri, 28 Dec 2012 14:57:26 -0800

ajit verghese: Future of Media: Are paywalls at newspapers inevitable? :

ajitmusic:

Over the past 12 years there has been a vast splintering of media business models - newspapers, music, television, movies, publishing, the list goes on - lots of blood letting all around. Everyone is figuring it out as we go - but a lot of organizations are trying buy more time to slow the…

robsandhu: Tony Fadell: On Setting Constraints, Ignoring...

Thu, 11 Oct 2012 11:51:19 -0700

robsandhu:

Tony Fadell: On Setting Constraints, Ignoring Experts & Embracing Self-Doubt

I notice that every year, around October, I am at my most...

Thu, 11 Oct 2012 11:16:00 -0700

Nicasio, CA

Chili peppers drying in a Sonoma greenhouse

Baxter running through vines ready for harvest

An awesome dining room at a vineyard

Beef Wellington I made with my mom

I notice that every year, around October, I am at my most meditative. Has anyone else noticed this?

My guess is that it relates to the end of summer, the beginning of fall/winter, assessing what has happened this year and thinking about holidays and the end of the year. It’s a month when I’m happiest settling down with a good book or writing. This isn’t always the case (in March, for instance, all I want to do is go fishing in Mexico or Florida; in June, I yearn for the adult equivalent of summer camp—a lake, a cabin, a bunch of friends).

Thought I’d share in case anyone else has noticed the same thing.

PS: These are pics of my fall so far.

Novels I'd like to write

Tue, 18 Sep 2012 22:24:53 -0700

These ideas for novels are two versions of attempts I’ve made throughout my life to make sense of things. As in, the whole world, and why we’re here; that sort of “thing.” My approach to thinking about this has always been to assume that the answer is both simpler and more bizarre than most people imagine. So the ideas are pretty far out there, along the lines of one of my favorite novels, “The Lathe of Heaven.” I don’t have names for them yet, as it strikes me as premature.

What if we never actually die? I’ve often thought about deja vu, and the fantasy that it occurs whenever we mentally connect with a parallel version of ourselves. So perhaps there are infinite versions of ourselves, each proceeding at the same pace, all the same age. But these selves sometimes make different decisions, even tiny ones, like whether to write this post, or which bus to take on the way home. The paths of the selves therefore diverge, most of the time only very slightly. If it were possible, you could easily slip into the life of a parallel self; everything would be familiar, almost exactly the same. And this is what happens when you “die.” For the other humans in that parallel world where you have passed, you appear to be dead. But mentally, you simply slipped into the life of the closest parallel version of yourself. It may feel like a blink, or a sense of deja vu, but what actually just happened was one version of you died, and your mind just keeps on going. Haven’t figured out how to deal with old age in this world…
Similarly, I like the idea that consciousness is actually a computer program. Perhaps one sign that this is true is our dreams. They seem so real when you’re experiencing them; I often am disappointed to wake up. It’s not that I dislike reality, but dreams, and the people and experiences in them, are so much more varied and flexible. Perhaps what I’m really experiencing is the world from the perspective of other people in the consciousness program. So while my mind is resting, I am able to, like “Being John Malkovich,” see through the eyes of other humans in the program. I could see an interesting thriller here where a character realizes this is the case and tries to make others see it. Yes, this sounds like the Matrix. No, Keanu will not have a role.

Ruby on Rails Tutorial with OS X Mountain Lion

Mon, 06 Aug 2012 12:48:00 -0700

The facts are below, but if you’re having problems following the excellent Ruby on Rails Tutorial and you’ve upgraded to OS X Mountain Lion, you might need to check out the following links:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/6848035/mac-os-x-lion-xcode-problems-using-rvm

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/11668675/heroku-push-rejected-hartls-rails-3-2-tutorial

Basically, you need to:

1) Make sure you’ve installed the latest XCode, and then make sure you’ve downloaded the latest Command Line Tools. This doesn’t solve the problem entirely, however, because:

2) You need to “symlink” gcc to /usr/bin/gcc-4.2. The command is “sudo ln -s /usr/bin/gcc /usr/bin/gcc-4.2”. When you do this, you’ll be able to get RVM to install the latest version of Rails.

3) In the tutorial, there’s a change to your Gemfile that dictates that jquery-rails be version 2.0.0 or higher. This creates a conflict for which version of Ruby to use, since jquery-rails 2.0.0 requires a different version of Ruby than the rest of the gems. So when you modify your Gemfile according to the tutorial, make sure you change the line referencing jquery-rails from “gem ‘jquery-rails’, ‘2.0.0’” to “gem ‘jquery-rails’”.

Hopefully, this will save you the roughly 4 hours of searching that I did to get here.

THE BACKGROUND:

ME: minimally proficient at command line, want to learn enough Ruby on Rails (RoR) to manage my team.

MY COMPUTER: MacBook Pro mid-2009, just installed Mountain Lion (OS X 10.8)

THE PAST: was working my way through the RoR Tutorial, which is excellent and free: http://ruby.railstutorial.org/ruby-on-rails-tutorial-book. This was last year, so I was using older versions of Ruby and Rails.

THE PRESENT: I decide to get back up to speed, so I check out the tutorial only to find that I need to update everything to the latest versions. And when I do, all hell breaks loose. I can’t launch the rails server because my gems aren’t loading properly. Evidently, my old XCode is no good anymore, and the new XCode (4.3) doesn’t come with gcc bundled. Even when I install the Command Line Tools manually from within XCode, RVM won’t load Rails 1.9.3 because it claims I am referencing a version of GCC that no longer is on my system. Thus began my journey.

Why I Don't Use FourSquare

Mon, 30 Jul 2012 16:36:00 -0700

Or Foodspotting, or any mobile app you have to use at dinner.

It’s Rude.

That’s it, folks. Stay classy.

ajitmusic: Perfect place for a secret lair….. llbwwb: Aerial...

Tue, 26 Jun 2012 13:23:08 -0700

ajitmusic:

Perfect place for a secret lair…..

llbwwb:

Aerial view of Aogashima volcanic island, Japan by heptasarim

Freedom > Fairness

Tue, 26 Jun 2012 13:23:00 -0700

We need to choose freedom over fairness. Educated societies always start out choosing freedom first, and it was a core philosophy in the founding of the United States. The problem is the political pressure to overreact every time someone makes a big mistake.

It’s not worth the price we pay in suppression of individual liberties to make the world perfectly fair, and it will never happen anyway. When unfairness happens, suck it up, get stronger and move on. Learn to avoid it next time. It’s more than politics; it’s Adulthood 101.

Take a break from BDSM fiction and read this on your next coffee break. Then decide if you really need big government, or anyone else, every time you make a mistake.

Tomales Bay

Tue, 12 Jun 2012 14:22:04 -0700

Tomales Bay

Enough Bullshit About Dancing Guy

Thu, 07 Jun 2012 00:09:00 -0700

I’ve watched too many heady explanations of this video as an example in leadership to keep silent any longer.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GA8z7f7a2Pk

I don’t want to be excessively negative, but let’s lay down some facts about Dancing Guy:

1) Standing alone and looking ridiculous isn’t a necessary step to leadership. It’s just an obvious prerequisite if you aim to single-handedly start a dance party, which is never predictable. Since you can’t start something unless you are the first, starting a dance party on your own means dancing alone. Which, when you’re drunk as shit (as this guy clearly is), looks ridiculous. You might as well watch someone survive going over Niagara in a barrel and conclude, “the secret to surviving waterfalls is to have a barrel.” In fact, it tells you only about luck and nothing about waterfalls or survival.

2) Further on that last point, Dancing Guy is lucky to end up with a party, as he looks like an ass. I am often a leader and definitely would not join this guy’s jean shorts gyration circle. I’ve also been the lone dancer on the dance floor dozens of times, and I can say with certainty that sometimes you just look (and feel) completely ostracized. It worked out for this guy, but there’s nothing about what he’s doing that is worth studying. He just happened to be at some sort of odd gathering of people where dudes flailing their arms about while clearly intoxicated are not thrown out by security. And where everyone in view of the camera was bored enough with their own crowd that a shit-faced shirtless guy having a rhythmic seizure was worth investigating.

3) Nothing suggests dancing guy has any leadership capability. He’s just more fucked up than everyone else. I don’t see anyone in this video asking him whether they should take that job offer because they value his opinion. Or whether he’d be willing to manage a crucial team for the new division of their company thanks to his decision-making skills in times of crisis. Who leads changes from situation to situation: sometimes it’s the super-athlete Hollywood hero who sees most clearly when he’s in a foxhole, and sometimes it’s the quiet analyst whom we all trust to reach a conclusion that will most benefit all parties. I can’t even think of an example where Dancing Guy would shine…maybe Bay to Breakers?

My point is, not only is it ridiculous to extrapolate leadership examples from this silly person; the narrow circumstances in which this behavior succeeds in leading others are not predictably repeatable. And even if they were, they’re not relevant to any other situation. The only thing guaranteed to result from acting like Dancing Guy is a video of you on YouTube shot by shocked and/or amused third parties. Which is fine, but I just want to add my contrarian voice to the echo chamber about this video: I know it’s fun to be pithy and positive about pop culture, but there are far better examples of leadership in this world than dudes in cutoff shorts on ‘shrooms at a hippy fest.

Explanatory video: you’re doing it right.

Thu, 17 May 2012 09:22:56 -0700

Explanatory video: you’re doing it right.

Oh, shit. Super fired up about this.

Wed, 16 May 2012 12:16:22 -0700

Oh, shit. Super fired up about this.

Three Elements to Happiness

Wed, 16 May 2012 12:07:26 -0700

Just had a great conversation with my friend, Ajit Verghese, an excellent startup consultant, about the decisions involved in being happy.

Ajit was mentioning how so often we materialize our objectives so that we can gain a firmer grasp of them, see them more clearly in our heads: to be happy, I’ll need x dollars or y position or z degree. The problem is that by materializing the goal, it becomes more definite but it also becomes finite. So when the goal is achieved, you’re left wondering what’s next.

I’m convinced there are three elements of the state of being happy, and the trick is choosing to keep them all present, all the time:

You’ve decided on a target, where you want to be. This is essential.
But more than that, you’ve convinced yourself that it’s something that you genuinely, even desperately, want. It can’t just be something that’s easy or not thrilling or won’t change your life. You’ve decided that if you hit that target, everything will change.
You know you’re on the right path to achieving that target. The time it takes to get there doesn’t matter; it just matters that you feel progress toward the target in a short enough time frame to be satisfying.

The key, really, is staying on element 3 as long as possible, since the chase (as long it meaningfully progresses) is the most satisfying part.

And one way to do that is to constantly shift element 1, so that before you hit the initial target you have a new one.

The rub is number 2: when you’re constantly shifting targets, it’s harder to convince yourself that each one is all that important. After all, you achieved the last one, and you’re still not experiencing that “life changing” sensation (I don’t believe anyone 100% recognizes, in the moment, a life changing moment; it’s usually after the fact).

This is all to say that goal-setting, which I think is crucial to direction and purpose in life and therefore to happiness, is a difficult balancing game. You want to set exciting goals that inspire you but that won’t let you down once achieved. I haven’t experienced this yet, but many seem to feel this way about financial goals: the fun was the chase, not the achievement. Steven Covey argues for principles as goals: living according to those principles is the target, and Benjamin Franklin-like, you should treat each day as an attempt to more perfectly do so.

I’d like to say that’s my satisfying conclusion, but the reality is I’m still targeting a few material things to keep me going.

In the interim, below is a calming picture of happiness from Austin:

What's the point?

Mon, 14 May 2012 17:21:00 -0700

My sister asked today if I would ever go back to practicing law, and I mentioned that I had recently done some legal work for friends that I really enjoyed. So there was a possibility.

This raised the question of why I quit in the first place: what was the point?

I’m not convinced that it’s possible to articulate with total confidence why I make big decisions, only how. Often something just irks me, like an itch I have to scratch. It doesn’t make sense to me to live with that itch, even if scratching it seems like it will set me back. And when I wake up every day with the same itch—nothing as dramatic as depression, or being miserable at work, or any of the superlative emotions that Hollywood would have everyone believe are necessary for change—at some point I know it’s time.

I believe, but don’t yet have enough evidence to be authoritative, that I am happier when I respond to the itches my body and mind create. I am working towards, but have not yet completely achieved, the perspective that what I should be measuring is not my progress in my career (or earnings) as compared with my peers. Nor is it the number of adventures or journeys or risks I have taken, even though I frequently value those things above material gain.

What I believe is most important is maximizing the number of times I go after something I really want to be or achieve. And minimizing the amount of time I spend working on things that I know are not part of who I want to be.

I value most the future I am creating, and second-most the way that I am currently spending my time. I am still learning the best way to balance those two against one another, but I know with certainty that I stand by the major decisions I have made that set me on this path. They are decisions I would want my grandchildren to make given the situation, because they responded to amorphous, confusing but deeply personal urges that came from within me and nowhere else. It seems to me that that’s the only way to make big decisions.

And in practical career terms, I’m still not sure I can say what the point was except that it was a decision I knew I had to make.

Plants and Animals is my new favorite band discovery from...

Mon, 14 May 2012 12:02:00 -0700

Plants and Animals is my new favorite band discovery from saidthegramophone.

My current desktop, taken at a beach outside of Inverness, CA in...

Mon, 14 May 2012 11:59:00 -0700

My current desktop, taken at a beach outside of Inverness, CA in August 2011 during a hike with Baxter.

Top Three Schools to Attend

Thu, 10 May 2012 13:42:00 -0700

Goal is to attend all three by 2014 at the latest.